Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England

The 'bonds of matrimony' describes with cruel precision the social and political status of married women in the nineteenth century. Women of all classes had only the most limited rights of possession in their own bodies and property yet, as this remarkable book shows, women of all classes found room to manoeuvre within the narrow limits imposed on them. Upper-class women frequently circumvented the onerous limitations of the law, while middle-class women sought through reform to change their legal status. For working-class women, such legal changes were irrelevant, but they too found ways to ameliorate their position. Joan Perkin demonstrates clearly in this outstanding book, full of human insights, that women were not content to remain inferior or subservient to men.

Joan Perkin

Introduction, Joan Perkin; Chapter 1 Women and The Law, Joan Perkin; Part 1 Marriage À La Mode; Chapter 2 A Family on the Throne, Joan Perkin; Chapter 3 One Law for the Rich, Joan Perkin; Chapter 4 The Glorious Licence of a Wife, Joan Perkin; Chapter 5 The Provoked Wife, Joan Perkin; Part 2 Respectables and Roughs; Chapter 6 Another Law for the Poor, Joan Perkin; Chapter 7 A Life of Willing Sacrifice in Sight of Autopoiesis, Joan Perkin; Chapter 8 Rough and Ready Women, Joan Perkin; Chapter 9 The Country Wife, Joan Perkin; Part 3 The Gilded Cage; Chapter 10 The Crusade against Marriage, Joan Perkin; Chapter 11 The Angel in the House, Joan Perkin; Chapter 12 A Life of One's Own, Joan Perkin; Chapter 13 The Battle of Jericho, Joan Perkin; Chapter 102 Conclusion, Joan Perkin;